Dave Pattern's blog

More "stuff like this"…

Spurred on by comments from Lisa, I’m exploring if we can filter the recommendations so that they become more relevant to students in a specific academic school, or even to students on a specific course, and the initial results look fairly promising🙂

Let’s look at a couple of examples:

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy (ISSN 0144-333X)

Here are the recommendations based on usage by all users. A quick browse through the items shows a range of subject areas — social exclusion, economics, human resources, etc, and a student would need to sift through to spot the items relevant to their subject area.

Now let’s filter the recommendations so that they’re only based on usage by students in a specific academic school:

Without knowing how our course codes are created, you can probably guess that courses starting with “BA…” are mostly accountancy & finance, and that those starting with “BM…” are to do with leadership and management.